Moving towards better healthcare in Singapore

The quest to map the DNA of 100,000 consenting Singaporeans, as part of research to find new ways of predicting and preventing diseases here and elsewhere in Asia, is an ambitious project. When completed, the SG100K study will create one of the Republic’s biggest research data sets, which will yield insights over the next three decades into the genetic basis for diseases in Singaporeans. As a major longitudinal study covering adults from different backgrounds and ethnicities, SG100K will help Singapore develop precision medicine, in which access to the human blueprint allows for diseases to be fixed at their roots. In particular, the findings of SG100K will help more closely to correlate patients’ genetic make-up, the variables present in their social environment, and the onset of severe diseases. This correlation would provide a powerful basis for preventive care through precision medicine.

The possibilities are exciting. Tailoring medical treatment to the specific genetic make-up of individuals – no two of whom are the same – means that a patient would receive targeted clinical intervention and optimised medication best suited to preventing disease and its progression and to minimising severe drug reactions. For example, it would be possible in some cancers for clinicians to examine the genetic characteristics of the tumour and to use that information as a basis for identifying the best possible treatment. In the field of disease prevention, precision medicine is useful in identifying individuals who are at higher risk of developing certain diseases. Prevention is better than cure, and the best prevention is of the early kind. Individuals whose DNA has been mapped would stand to benefit from the knowledge that would be available to the medical profession to treat them should they run into health problems, which are an expected hazard.